Ground sloth
.]] Ground sloths, giant sloths, or giant ground sloths were a group of sloths belonging to four families (Megalonychidae, which also includes the extant two-toed sloths, Megatheriidae, Nothrotheriidae, and Mylodontidae; some authorities also consider Scelidotheriidae, Orophodontidae, and Rathymotheriidae distinct families) which lived in the Americas from the Eocene until at least 8,000 years ago, with an accepted later date of around 1550 years ago for the Caribbean species. They are generally considered to have been wiped out by human hunting. Ever since the first ground sloth fossils were discovered in the late 18th Century, it has been theorised that they may still persist in remote parts of the Americas, and a fairly large number of cryptids have been identified as possibly being ground sloths, if they are real. Cryptids which may be living ground sloths have been reported from , , , , , , , , , the , , , , , , , the , and : as noted by Karl Shuker, "there is no doubt that a medium-sized species of surviving ground sloth would solve a number of currently unresolved cryptozoological conundra,"Shuker, Karl P. N. ShukerNature: WHEN NANDI BEARS AND GROUND SLOTHS CAME TO TOWN? TWO EARLY EXHIBITIONS OF CRYPTIDS IN ENGLAND? karlshuker.blogspot.com 8 June 2019 and much larger, smaller, and even aquatic ground sloths have also been put forward as identities for certain cryptids. Early European beliefs When the first remains of Megatherium were discovered in 1788, they were believed to have belonged to a living animal, an enormous mole which had burrowed to the surface by accident, and been scorched to death by the sun. According to Bernard Heuvelmans, after the fossils had been studied and revealed as a giant sloth, the King of Spain instructed explorers to capture a live Megatherium for him. When Thomas Jefferson described the giant sloth Megalonyx (which he believed to be a lion) in 1797, he assumed the animal was still extant, and asked Lewis and Clark, as they planned their famous expedition in 1804 to 1806, to keep an eye out for living specimens of Megalonyx, as this would support his case. Following the discovery that it was a sloth and not a lion, French naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent agreed with Jefferson regarding its survival. In 1848, British naturalist and antiquarian Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith theorised based on American Indian legends that the first people in the Americas had coexisted with giant ground sloths and mastodons - however, he did not believe that either animal was still alive. Giant ground sloths Patagonia Although the first alleged evidence of modern-day ground sloth survival came from Patagonia, there have been few recorded sightings of ground sloth-like animals from the region. A collection of somewhat nebulous clawed monsters in Patagonian tradition have been connected with the Patagonian ground sloth, including the succarath, lobo-toro, and ellengassen. Florentino Ameghino also claimed that he had heard may stories of a: Ameghino also wrote that Ramón Lista, governor of Santa Cruz, told himself, his brother Carlos Ameghino, and several other people of a sighting he'd had of a large, hairy, pangolin-like creature: Hesketh Prichard, who was sent to Patagonia to search for the Mylodon, could not find a record of the encounter in any of the books written by Lista, who was dead by the time of the skin's discovery. Prichard did not believe a large animal could live in Patagonia's dense Valdivian forests, which he did not explore. However, he admitted that "in addition to the regions visited by our Expedition, there are, as I have said, hundreds and hundreds of square miles about, and on both sides of the Andes, still unpenetrated by man. A large portion of this country is forested, and it would be presumptuous to say that in some hidden valley far beyond the present ken of man some prehistoric animal may not still exist. Patagonia is, however, not only vast, but so full of natural difficulties". Paraguay During the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin noted the South American belief that "there exists in Paraguay an animal larger than a bullock, & which goes by the name of "gran bestia", and wrote that, "if no credit is given to the actual existence of the "gran bestia"," then it must have been based on sightings of perfect Megatherium skeletons, as, according to him, the resemblance to a giant sloth is too striking to be accidental.Chancellor, Gordon Darwin's Geological diary from the voyage of the Beagle darwin-online.co.uk 3 June 2019 Both Darwin and Captain Fitz-Roy were told by a Bahia Blanca garrison commandant named Rodriguez that he had seen a gran bestia seen chained in Paraguay. It resembled a hog with talons (or "great claws"), and, although only a few months old, it already stood about four feet high. Fitz-Roy seemingly thought the animal could have been a yaquaru, a sabre-toothed cat-like animal,Fitz-Roy, Robert (1839) Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe whilst Darwin believed it was simply a tapir. Amazon Basin Cryptids resembling large ground sloths have frequently been reported from the Amazon regions of , , , and . The most famous of these is the mapinguari, which is, however, also described as an ape-like animal. David Oren and the cryptozoologists of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, including Karl Shuker, believe the mapinguari may be a living ground sloth;Shuker, Karl (2010) Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times older cryptozoologists such as Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson, as well as a number of modern cryptozoologists including Loren Coleman and Dale A. Drinnon, believe it is a giant hominid. Much of the confusion arises from mixed-up accounts of different animals, and the application of the name "mapinguari" to a number of different cryptids. Heuvelmans did associate a 21' long "human" footprint, supposedly made by the mapinguari, with either Megatherium or the Triassic Prestosuchus. According to Dale A. Drinnon, there have been consistent generic reports of creatures resembling bear-sized ground sloths from the Amazon since colonial times. Native accounts generally stress their large claws, which in more dramatic stories are said to be stained red with the blood of their victims. Drinnon refers to them as "wolfskins," and says that the old term su is still used to refer to them in parts of South America (see below).Drinnon, Dale A. Frontiers of Zoology: More on Mapinguaris And Ground Sloths frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com In 1953, explorer Leonard Clark claimed that a piece of Megatherium skin had recently been found in an "upland cave".Clark, Leonard (1953) The Rivers Ran East. When Glenn Shepard Jr. was with the Machiguenga people of the far western Amazon, in Peru, tribesmen all mentioned a fearsome slothlike creature called the segamai that inhabited a hilly, forested area in their territory. A member of the tribe remarked matter of factly that he had also seen a segamai at the natural history museum in Lima. When Shepard checked, he realised that the museum has a display featuring a model of a giant ground sloth.The New York Times - A Huge Amazon Monster Is Only A Myth. Or Is It? Geovaldo, a Karitiana man who claimed to have either ran away from or shot a kida harara, explicitly identified the animal he saw with a model of a Megalonyx shown to him by Pat Spain.Beast Man: Nightmare of the Amazon The Karitiana themselves equate their kida harara with the mapinguari. Other, lesser-known Amazonian cryptids which may be ground sloths include the jucucu, which is also frequently lumped together with the mapinguari;"Mega Sloth". Monster Encounters: Series 1, Episode 7. the Orinoco giant sloth, which allegedly grows up to 5 metres (16 feet) long, and uses its large claws to browse from the tops of trees and dig up roots;Vašíček, Arnošt (1996) Planeta záhad and the ujea, the description of which reminded researcher Angel Morant Forés of a giant sloth.Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology An investigation into some unidentified Ecuadorian mammals There are also dubious stories of a smaller, supposedly predatory ground sloth, called the xolchixe or "tiger sloth", from the Brazilian Amazon. Although no alleged sightings of ground sloths in the Amazon had been reported by the publication of Bernard Heuvelmans' On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955) - in which the examination of supposed living ground sloths focuses on the Patagonian ground sloth - Heuvelmans did predict that they might survive there. He noted that, since giant ground sloths were almost certainly wiped out by human hunting and not climate change, it is difficult to see why they would go extinct in regions uninhabited or sparsely habited by humans, particularly the tropical regions of northern South America. He concluded his examination of Patagonian ground sloths by writing: Central America Ivan T. Sanderson suspected that reports of cave cows from , describing hairy lizard-shaped animals, referred to medium-sized living ground sloths.Sanderson, Ivan T. (1969) PURSUIT Newsletter No. 5 United States A handful of cryptids alleged to be living giant sloths have been sporadically reported from the , most notably the Appalachian ground sloth; the sheepsquatch, which is reported from a similar range, is also sometimes speculated to be a giant sloth.Frontiers of Zoology: Appalachian Groundsloths, and others Southwards The Beasts of Sherman, allegedly sighted in New York in the 1960's, were explicitly identified as white giant sloths by the eyewitness,Keel, John (1970) The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings''Hallenbeck, Bruce G. (2013) ''Monsters of New York: Mysterious Creatures in the Empire State and the Beast of Boonville was said to have been a giant sloth captured in Mexico which had escaped captivity.Cryptomundo >> Giant Sloth in Ohio River Valley? Certain researchers also theorise that Bigfoot may be a living giant ground sloth. Canada The saytoechin, a large, hairy animal with claws reported from the Yukon, was identified with a picture of a giant ground sloth by Native American informants.British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club Quarterly These informants also reported that a saytoechin had been shot in a lake by a white man; this man's story, independently told by himself, described a sloth-like animal with a 3-foot-long tail.Cryptid Profile: Saytoechin (AKA: Beaver-Eater) - The Pine Barrens Institute Ben S. Roesch suggests that, if it is a giant sloth, the saytoechin's purpoted predation of beavers is a misinterpretation, and that the animal really rips open beaver hives to eat the branches and vegetation they are made of.Roesch, Ben S. "Ground Sloth Survival in North America", Animals & Men 11 (1996) Roesch also suggests that the giant squirrels of Nova Scotian Micmac lore were late-surviving ground sloths. Although they never harmed people, these animals were a nuisance to the Micmacs because they ate their houses, which were made of bark. According to the Micmacs, the giant squirrels eventually disappeared, but as the Micmac's legends are believed to occur no further back in history than around 500 B.C., the animals must have survived into medieval times in this area. Roesch also briefly speculated that the camel-like urchow of the Nass Valley could be another living ground sloth. Small ground sloths The smaller semi-arboreal ground sloths of the West Indies are believed to have gone extinct much later than the mainland sloths, perhaps persisting into the colonial era: according to Walker's Mammals of the World, their bones have been discovered in European middens alongside those of introduced domestic pigs.Frontiers of Zoology: West Indian "Devils" Yahus Yehos, small, ape-like creatures with claws (which are not a feature of primates) reported from , , Hispaniola, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, may represent living or late-surviving forms of these smaller, arboreal West Indian ground sloths. Missionary Thomas Bridges originally believed the saapaim, a shaggy sheep-sized animal with large claws reported from the deepest forests of Tierra del Fuego in , could have been "a sloth". Austin Whittall disagrees because of the saapaim's reportedly large and powerful incisor teeth.Mysterious Fuegian creature: Saapaim | Patagonian Monsters Aquatic ground sloths At least two genera of giant sloth, the small freshwater Ahytherium of and the larger, marine Thalassocnus of , were aquatic animals. Although they are believed to have gone extinct before the other giant sloths, around 3 million years ago, Austin Whittall speculates that a late-surviving (post-Ice Age) freshwater Patagonian species of the bulky Thalassocnus could explain several Patagonian lake monsters.Marine Ground Sloths | Patagonian Monsters The ningen of the Antarctic Ocean, described as a 20' to 30' human-like being, has been connected with large marine sloths like Thalassocnus by some. See also *Category:Theory: Living fossil - Ground sloth *Carnivorous ground sloth theory *Ground sloth domestication Notes and references Do you think it's possible that giant ground sloths could still live? Yes No I'm not sure Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Category:Paraguay Ground sloth Category:Venezuela Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Ground sloth Category:Latest fossil: Holocene